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Marx, architecture and modernity

David Cunningham, Jon Goodbun

School of Social Sciences, Humanities & Languages/

WAG Architecture; School of Architecture and Built
Environment; University of Westminster, London, UK

This paper reviews some current manifestations of Marxist thought within and around
architectural discourse, building on papers presented at a symposium held at the University
of Westminster in May, 2004.
Introduction
Although its obituaries continue to be popularly disseminated, Marxist thinking remains a significant intellectual force within contemporary critical and
cultural theory, if not, so clearly, within mass politics.
Indeed, in many respects, it seems healthier, leaner
and more active in these areas than it has been for
some time, renewed both by contemporary
discourses surrounding globalisation and the anticapitalist movement, and by various recent theoretical
developments from the UK and North America to
continental Europe and South America. More often
than not such activity has been fed by a belated
return to the writings of Marx himself. One thinks of
Antonio Negris seminal post-workerist readings of
the Grundrisse, David Harveys revisiting of the 1848
Manifesto, or the recent resurrection of debates
surrounding the Hegelian character of Marxs
Capital, and its implications for contemporary philosophy and social theory.1 Equally, one thinks of Jacques
Derridas influential and (at its time of writing)
untimely intervention in Spectres of Marx, or of
Gilles Deleuze who died before completing a book
he intended to call Grandeur de Marx. At the same
time, Marx is increasingly proclaimed, as much on
the right as on the left, to be the great prophet of
contemporary globalisation; a prophet who, once
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stripped of his articulation of an alternative (communist) future uncoiling itself from within the very structures of the capitalist present, can be perversely
accepted by leading theorists of the American
business class as the one thinker who actually
reveals the true nature of capitalism.2 While there
is much about this that should (and does) disquiet
usas the production of a Marx devoid of all revolutionary fervourit indicates why the writings of a
thinker that Foucault once described as the author
of an entire discourse should appear, yet again, to
have become the terrain upon which a series of
current debates are destined to be fought out.
At the very least, what the contemporary
ideologues of globalisation recognise is that Marx
matters today because he was, perhaps, the
thinker, not only of nineteenth-century capitalism,
but of capitalism in itself. As one commentator
puts it, the actuality of das Kapital is that of its
object . . . capital itselfan insatiable vampire and
fetish-automaton now more invasive than ever.3
With the dramatic implosion of historical communism in Eastern Europe, and the accelerated absorption of non-Western societies into the resurgent
regimes of capital accumulation that it helped to
generate, Marxs analyses of capitalism in itself
are thus of increasing, not decreasing, relevance;
13602365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360600787066

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although accompanying this is a demand that they

not become petrified again in the suffocating grip
of doctrinal orthodoxy. A return to Marx today is
not, or should not be, a return to the Same and
the already given.4 Still, if capital obviously does
not operate in the way it did in the nineteenth
century . . . yet it operates. And, whatever its flaws
(which remain open to debate), we do not have a
better starting point for its critical analysis than
Marx.5
It was with this in mind that we organised, in May,
2004, a small one-day colloquium at the University
of Westminster in London which sought to bring
some of these transdisciplinary debates to bear
upon the discipline of architecture; a colloquium,
and a general idea, that appears to have generated
some interest and, hence, seems worth recounting
and exploring further here.6 In inviting various
people to contribute to this discussion, we were
guided by a concern to engage the implications for
architectural knowledge of what appear to us to
be three particularly significant (and, in one sense,
heretical) developments of Marxian thought, each
of which possesses considerable contemporary
resonance.
The first of these, and the most directly architectural, is the body of work written by Manfredo
Tafuri and the Venice School, and its ongoing dissemination and extension through the work of Anglophone theorists such as Frederic Jameson. Although
Tafuris work continues, slowly, to gain respect
across the broader field of cultural studies, architectural theory has, paradoxically, largely avoided
confronting and developing this difficult legacy;
perhaps precisely because of the difficult questions

it raises for the architectural profession itself. Justified by simplistic accusations of structural pessimism and lack of a specific methodology for
architectural activity, neglect looks increasingly
like mere evasion of some uncomfortable issues.7
Anthony Vidler and Gail Days recent critical engagements present an honourable exception, and, as
they demonstrated in their papers at the colloquium,
both are, not coincidentally, distinguished by an
attention to the properly Marxist dimensions of
Tafuris oeuvre.
By contrast to Tafuris relative neglect, the enormity of both Walter Benjamins and Henri Lefebvres
respective contributions to thinking about spatial
culture has at least succeeded in achieving widespread recognition, if at times superficially, in architectural and urbanist circles. The recent
interventions of Marxist or post-Marxist urbanists
and geographers (such as Harvey and Castells),
who have been inspired by Lefebvre in particular, is
one of the most promising of recent developments.
In the case of Benjamin, it is in the potential he
provides for something like a phenomenological
account of urban experience that his influence has
been perhaps most profoundly felt, generating the
groundwork for a vast array of contemporary theoretical projects. Together, although they in fact
represent quite distinct legacies, its fair to say that
Benjamin and Lefebvre have been the guiding theoretical lights for an elaboration of a specifically
culturalist (as opposed to sociological-empirical)
approach to the urban8 that has had an almost
unprecedented impact upon architectural history
and theory in recent times. It was from this position
that, in their respective papers at the colloquium,

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Iain Borden outlined a possible Marxian phenomenology grounded in a Lefebvrian rhythm-analysis of

everyday space, and Jane Rendell attempted to
counsel the unhappy marriage of Marxism and
feminism.
The third strand we identified in the colloquium,
which to some degree mediates the concerns of
the others, is the recent (often broadly philosophical)
reviews of Marxist thought developed around the
histories and theories of the avant-garde, taking
up the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School as
well as the artistic practices of Dada, Surrealism,
Situationism, and their heirs.9 Peter Osbornes writings on the architectural turn in post-conceptual
art practice and culture would be one key instance
of this, emphasising the socio-political underpinnings of this turn, as a desired engagement with
arts institutional structuring and its opening out
on to the city beyond.10 More broadly, the question
of the avant-garde raises here the issue of what
role might still be played, today, by imaginings of
a qualitatively different non-capitalist future at a
moment when, as Tafuri unceasingly reminds us,
such imaginings may simply provide ideological
and aesthetic cover for the ongoing reproduction
of capitalism itself.11
If each of these strands inherits a Marxian
discourse in some way, such inheritance is never a
simple process. A legacy is neither automatic nor
homogeneous, and true inheritance is always, in
some part of itself, a kind of betrayal, as it must be
to be true at all. We do not wish here, therefore,
to speak for the participants in the discussion
we have sought to initiate, or to corral them into
a unified theory of Marx, architecture and

modernity. Rather we want to respond, often obliquely, to the questions they have helped us to articulate, and, in doing so, to offer the reader some broad
account of just a few of the issues that might be at
stake in all this.

Marx:Architecture
What then would constitute the relationship
between the terms Marx and Architecture?
Indeed, what do we want to signify by Marx?
We have, clearly, the historical nineteenth-century
figure Karl Marx and his known writings (both the
published texts and the notebooks). And it is clear
from these that Marx did not set out anything like
a coherent Marxist theory of architecture upon
which we could draw. Nor, for that matter, did he
set out a coherent Marxist theory of either aesthetics
or space (a point that will be returned to). Yet, his
texts are full of a range of suggestive architectural,
spatial and bodily references.
Engels famously described Marxs project as
coming out of the synthesis of three strands of
European thought: economics (British), politics
(French), and philosophy (German). Architectural
knowledge at times must deal with similar syntheses, and so it is perhaps not surprising that it provides some fertile material for Marx. It is worth
setting out what some of this material is. There are
first the texts that deal directly with an urban (and,
thus, implicitly architectural) subject matter, such
as the section on the country and the city in the
German Ideology of 1845, and in the 1848 Manifesto,
or the constant references and comments on the
processes and effects of industrial urbanisation.
There are also texts on housing and urbanism by

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Marxs collaborator Engels. More generally, and

significantly for our concerns, there is a sense in
which, for Marx, the basic productive impulses of
the architectural and the urban are understood
as co-originary with the human itself. Or at least,
human consciousness is for his philosophy, as he
began to develop it from the early 1840s, simultaneously produced through the act of producing
an environment; an environment, a worked
matter, which is understood as both alienated and
alienating consciousness.12 Marx must thus be
understood as both, first, a theorist of human production generally, and, second, a theorist of capitalist production in particular. He provides the
theoretical foundations for his own relevance, as it
were, by initially theorising how the human is produced, and then looking at our particular historical
form of that production.
It would be interesting to relate this, for example,
to the recent arguments of Edward Soja who,
drawing on the archaeological research of Kathleen
Kenyon and James Mellaart, asserts the existence of
what he calls a First Urban Revolution, essentially
co-terminous with human society as such, beginning
in Southwest Asia over 10,000 years agothe
development of pre-agricultural urban settlements
of hunters, gatherers and traders that he identifies
with the spatially specific urban forms to be
found at Jericho in the Jordan Valley and Catal
Huyuk in southern Anatolia. This inversion of the
usual historical narrative, in which the agricultural
revolution precedes the urban, has profound consequences for rethinking any natural-historical
account of the human, and for the phenomenological implications (to which we will return below) of

what Soja describes as a process, beginning with

the body, by which the human is produced
through a complex relation with our surroundings.
The social is, as Marx implicitly recognised, always
at the same time intrinsically spatial.13 Expanding
the term building to city or metropolis, we can
understand, then, the workings of a broader dialectic of architectural production, consciousness, alienation and experience perpetually at work in Marxs
writings (if somewhat marginalised in their development). The discourse of Marx and the discourse
that emerged around space simultaneously codeveloped out of Young Hegelian preoccupations
with the relationship between matter and spirit.
These are thus texts that share concerns with
architectural thought, and which make his infiltration into architectural theory possible. A key
example would be from his early writings, in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, composed
in 1843 4.14 Here Marx outlines what can be read
as something like a body-based materialist phenomenology of technology, located in the notion that
man is affirmed in the objective world not only in
the act of thinking, but with all his senses.15 The
senses, Marx famously writes, have become theoreticians in their immediate praxis . . . Apart from these
direct organs, social organs are therefore created in
the form of society . . . [as] a mode of appropriation
of human life.16 For Marx, the (collective and individual) subject is, as Etienne Balibar states, nothing
other than practice which has already begun and
continues indefinitely.17 As this early naturalhistorical account would have it, the biological
species, therefore, only becomes human when it
begins to produce its own environment through

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social co-operation. In this sense what Marx means

by the economic is, most fundamentally, a
mediation between social and biological aspects.
Production is the source of a universality which
makes the whole of nature mans inorganic
body.18 Nature becomes, through technics, a prosthetic extension which defines the human itself, in
the sense that the human is intrinsically (rather
than merely secondarily) prosthetic. The technical
is, as Bernard Stiegler has insisted (thinking of both
Marx and Heidegger), more than a tool: it is a
condition of the invention of the human itself.19
The significance of such an idea for an expanded
conception of architectural praxis, and of the historical logic of the urban, should be apparent.
Indebted, no doubt, to a certain German Romantic tradition of aesthetic philosophy in general, and
spatial aesthetic theory in particularwhich we
know Marx was reading, and continued to read,
throughout his lifetexts such as this suggest
that, in its original formulations and sources, one
way of understanding the Marxist synthesis of
economics, politics and philosophy would be
through the use of aesthetic structures in economic
and political formations. Thus in Marxs later move
towards an apparently purer economic focus, in
the Grundrisse and Capital, certain aesthetic
models can still be found at work both within the
analysis of the form of the commodity-object itself,
and within the concept of commodity fetishism.20
In a sense, much of Benjamins most famous
workprobably without any direct influence from
Marxs early writingsstarts from here, although,
typically, its roots in Marxian thought tend to
be occluded by many of his most enthusiastic

proponents in contemporary cultural and urban

studies. And, again, this is not without direct relevance to architectural questions. In a famous
passage towards the end of The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin
writes:
Buildings have been mans companions since
primeval times. Many art forms have developed
and perished . . . [But] architecture has never
been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of
any art, and its claim to being a living force has
significance in every attempt to comprehend the
relationship of the masses to art . . . [The] mode
of appropriation, developed with reference to
architecture, in certain circumstances acquires
canonical value. For the tasks which face the
human apparatus of perception at the turning
points of history cannot be solved by optical
means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They
are mastered gradually by habit.21
In this conceptionthat the mode of human sense
perception changes with humanitys entire mode of
existence . . . determined not only by nature but by
historical circumstances as wellwe have the basis
for an entire Marxian-phenomenological account of
the architectural as spatial practice.
If the terms of phenomenology can seem dubious
in contemporary architectural theory, and unlikely to
intersect with Marxist thought, it is, no doubt,
because of the ethico-sentimental conservatism
which has tended to define such thinking in recent
decades. Typically, architectural phenomenologies,
such as those of Christian Norberg Schultz, Dalibor
Veseley, or Juhani Pallasmaa (to name some of
the more successful) have all tended in various

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ways problematically to essentialise and dehistoricise

the experiencing body, emphasising the supposedly
timeless and natural, confusing philosophical
methods and polemical ambitions. Whilst one
might sympathise with the desires to ameliorate
the alienating effects of spectacle and rampant
consumer capitalism that often seem to animate
these discourses, one must maintain the demand
for a sober historical phenomenology that accounts
for the bodys ever-shifting interaction with its
environment; an interaction which has undergone
fundamental and irreversible change in the second
nature of capitalist modernity. This is not to deny
that there are components of our bodies and
environments that undergo very slow change, and
a sophisticated Marxian phenomenology might
unravel the simultaneous and competing spatialities
and temporalities at work in our experiencing.
Indeed it is perhaps in the nearly timeless, and
therefore, at one level, effectively pre-capitalist,
slow rhythms of the body, that we might find the
basis for some forms of future resistance to the
commodification of our bodies and environments.
Yet this does not efface the need for a properly
socio-historical account of our complex relation
with our surroundings.
At the same time, undoing the largely conservative determinations of phenomenology is often
hampered by the dominantly iconographic (rather
than properly spatial) model which now drives,
inside and outside of the academy, a contemporary
understanding of architectural meaning; and
which requires us to revise somewhat Benjamins
assertions regarding architectures non-auratic character. This itself takes place in a cultural context in

which a select group of architects are increasingly

feted as the great figures of artistic genius and
power in our time. Intensifying what Tafuri saw as
the irreversible reduction of its socially transformative ambitions to a form without utopia . . . to
sublime uselessness,22 such uselessness has itself,
paradoxically if inevitably, proved to be of great
ideological use to the contemporary imperatives
of capital accumulation. The contemporary drama
of architecture thus appears, dominantly, as one of
spectacle and brand image. As against this, the
essential Marxist task should become one of reconceiving a genuinely modernist conception of spatial
practice as the condition for architectural knowledge, that is, the production of a phenomenological
account of the spatio-temporal forms through
which the distinctive social relationships of capitalist
modernity are reproduced and extended. While
architecture cannot itself overcome such relationships, in its reflection upon them it can at least
promote a lucid awareness of their conditions, and
an understanding of the new forms of subjective
experience produced. This would seem to us to be
the basis for a broadly Marxian analysis today.

Modernity
What about our third term thenmodernity? How
might a return to the writings of Marx inform our
specific understanding of architecture and modernity, and of their interrelationship, at this point?
For Marshall Berman, famously, Marx and Engels
1848 Communist Manifesto is an expression of
some of modernisms deepest insights [which], at
the same time, dramatises some of its deepest
inner contradictions, both one of the classic texts

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of political modernism, and the archetype of a

century of modernist manifestos and movements
to come.23 And, in the passage that provides the
title for Bermans All That is Solid Melts Into Air,
we find a brilliant account of modernity by Marx
himself:
It [the bourgeoisie] has accomplished wonders
far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted
expeditions that put into the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie
cannot exist without constantly revolutionising
the instruments of production, and thereby the
relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society. Conservation of old modes of
production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary,
the first condition of existence for all earlier
industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeoisie epoch from all earlier
ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their
train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All
that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with
sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind. The need for a constantly
expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must
nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connections everywhere. [ . . . ] The bourgeoisie
has subjected the country to the rule of the
towns. It has created enormous cites, has greatly

increased the urban population as compared with

the rural, and thus rescued a considerable part of
the population from rural idiocy.24
Noting the presence of architecture and the urban at
both ends of this very famous passage, we should
say something of what we understand by the
terms modernity and modernism in relation to
these paradigmatically spatial discourses.
For Berman, this passage describesprecisely in
phenomenological, as well as socio-economic
fashion (although the two cannot in fact be separated)
the experience of modernity (Bermans subtitle).
Modernity here embraces both what he terms modernisationthe general process of socio-economic
and technological developmentand modernism
the various cultural and/or subjective responses to
this process of modernisationand, to a degree
that Berman himself fails to bring out, modernity
articulates something of the shared spatio-temporal
form of both. As Osborne puts it, in what may
be regarded, in part, as a reading of the Marx
passage, modernity, in these terms, refers to something like a culture of temporal abstraction:
[Modernity] defines a distinctive structure of
historical experience. Nonetheless, the unity of
this structure notwithstanding, its concrete meanings are subject to significant historical variation,
relative to the specific terms and boundaries of
the various fields of experience that are subjected
to its temporal logic, and to the specific modes of
negation that are employed. [ . . . ] Modernity is
the name for an actually existing, or socially
realised, temporal formalism that is constitutive
of certain formations of subjectivity. It is in
this sense that it is a distinctively cultural

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category: the fundamental form of timeconsciousness in capitalist societies.25

Modernism would, then, in turn, be the general
name for a cultural or subjective self-consciousness
about, and expression of, this temporal logic of
modernity, and of its dialectic of negation and
newness: a constant revolutionising that incessantly negates all fixed, fast frozen relations. Artistically, the modernist work is that which, in some
way, registers this non-identity of modernity and
tradition within itself, engaging the social logic of
capitalist modernity at the level of form.
All this is broadly well known and understood, and
Bermans terms are ones that have often been
taken up in architectural theory over the last
decade or so, most recently by Hilde Heynen.26 Yet
they need here to be reconnected to that social
logic of capitalism itself if we are to draw out
their full significance; a reconnection which requires
a certain return to Marx. Let us thus re-read the
Marx passage and note one of its other theoretical
dimensions: The need for a constantly expanding
market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over
the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections
everywhere. For Marx himself, the temporal
condition of modernity described by Osborne is,
then, simultaneously the production of (and may
be produced out of) new spatial relationships. That
is to say, modernitys progressive intensification of
a temporal logic also entails a progressive negation
of certain historically-specific spatial logics and
relationshipsmost obviously, those associated
with place as traditionally conceived in terms of
physical contiguity or belonging. As Marx writes in

the Grundrisse, in capitalist modernity there is a

sense in which even spatial distance reduces itself
to time: While capital must on one side strive to
tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, ie,
to exchange, and conquer the whole world for its
market, it strives on the other side to annihilate
this space with time.27 Thus, as the fundamental
form of time-consciousness within capitalist
society, modernity equally serves to constitute its
fundamental form of space-consciousnessthe ultimate horizon of a connectivity, of an everywhere,
of pure equi-valence.
We will not be the first to note that, although
Marx himself only implies the term, such a spatial
form and consciousness of connectivity takes,
among its most famous names, that of the metropolis, which, for Simmel, was space as dominated by
the money economy. As a system of connectivity, the
metropolis is formed, as Benjamin says in one of his
conversations with Brecht, by a boundless maze of
indirect relationships, complex mutual dependencies
and compartmentations.28 The space of the metropolis is one made up of newly differentiated and
variegated flows of connection, where the individual
subject is increasingly dependent upon an ensemble
of rationalised and abstract mediations of social
relationships that resist understanding. Above all,
as modern form, the metropolis is a dynamic technical system of relationships or referencesie,
precisely what Marx calls a system of production
which, in an historical sense, defines the very
nature of the human itself. In this sense, the metropolis might well be understood conceptually as the
spatial correlate, the material support, of the
culture (of temporal abstraction) of modernity in

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general.29 Such a reading would, we think, follow

directly from the passage from the Manifesto. This
is implicit also in Berman, whose book is essentially
a compendium of urban experience (Paris,
St Petersburg, New York), but fails to be adequately
developed there at the conceptual level required.
At any rate, in these terms, what we understand
by modernism, in architecture, cannot thus be
reduced solely to its use of new technologies or
materialsglass, steel, reinforced concretenor to
its particular, diverse stylistic forms and rhetorics,
but, above all, must be understood through its ineliminable engagement with, and subjection to, the
spatial and temporal forms of the urban. Architectures modern identity cannot be disentangled
from the larger social and spatial formations of
what Marx describes as a subjection of the
country to the rule of the towns. What Beatriz Colomina says of Loos, that the subject of [his] architecture is the citizen of the metropolis, immersed in its
abstract relations, is true in far more general
terms.30 From nineteenth-century utopianism and
functionalism, through Le Corbusier and Mies, to
the likes of Koolhaas, and Herzog and de Meuron
today, it is the historical increase in the urban
population as opposed to the rural, one of the key
social logics of capitalist modernity, and the spatial
conditions of this historically new metropolitan life,
which is the always-implicit subject of modern architecture, and in relation to which it must irresistibly
articulate itself. Modernism is, in part, the question
of what such a life might mean, and of what
forms it can and should take.
Let us return to the architectural examples in the
passage from the Communist Manifesto itself in

order to begin to unpack what we might understand

more specifically by architectural modernity here.
What exactly are the wonders far surpassing
Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic
cathedrals that capitalist modernity has accomplished? What is their nature and historical logic?
Capitalism has consistently visualised, symbolised
and articulated its most radical ideas and practices
through both real and imagined spatial developments and experiences, from the nineteenthcentury Great Exhibitions and urban infrastructures
to the contemporary resorts of Las Vegas. As well as
existing as commodities and spectacles, these and
almost all architectural objects are themselves a new
part of the production cycle. In a self-evident way a
factory building is part of the means of production.
Slightly less obvious but just as structural to production are the airport, the high-speed railway
system, the shopping centre, and the home itself.
A principal manifestation of modernism in architecture is the communication of new processes of
modernisation. Most visibly this has been the
expression of new construction technologies and
materials. There is little need to repeat the canonic
histories of steel, glass and concrete architectural
expression over the last century, or to remind the
reader of the communicative potential of contemporary developments such as computer-aided
manufacturing or ecological design. However, processes of modernisation have of course not been
restricted to construction, but would certainly
include organisational technologies and media technologies as well. Again, very familiar examples of
modernism constituted through what are conceived
of as processes of modernisation could be drawn

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from both its canonic and marginal histories.

In addition there are buildings that express cultural
or subjectively formed responses to the experience
of modernityas well as buildings which might
self-consciously articulate, as objects, experiences
of modernity in themselves. In recent years, Peter
Eisenman for example has repeatedly stated that
his work confronts an alienated modern subjectivity
through the production of equally alienated posthumanist objectsusing an argument more
convincingly employed by Michael Hayes in his
discussion of the historical avant garde.31 Libeskind
too, in the Jewish Museum at least, has attempted
to use the physical experience of alienation
induced through the occupation of architectural form
as a method for intensifying narrative programme.
In a similar although more easily generalisable
way, Zaha Hadid has claimed to be involved in an
implicitly politicised continuation of the unfinished
modern projectand certainly in schemes like the
Leipzig BMW plant, it might be argued that the
formal abstractions employed by the architect
intensify the spatial experience of the modern
programme. Similar claims can be made about the
work of an increasing number of converging practices UN Studio, Future Systems or Ushida
Findlay, to name just some of the usual suspects
although, of course, any contemporary building is,
in principle, generative of such experience, as
indeed are the global-metropolitan spatial structures
that we occupy, from railway stations and airports to
the World Wide Web. As Marx indicated in 1848,
our historical form of space-consciousness does
indeed entail, with ever-increasing force, a compulsion to establish connections everywhere as a

very condition of the spatial environmenta compulsion which resonates in, for example, David
Greenes Locally Available World Unseen Networks,
the negative utopianism of Superstudios Continuous Monument, or much of Koolhaass most important work; various visions of an architectural web
that might encompass the entire planet. Such
examples would clearly be near endless. The
crucial point here, however, is a more general and
structural one. What do we mean by the modernity
of modern architecture itself? And how does this,
in turn, relate to modernitys complex imbrication
with the logics of capitalist development? If, as
Osborne says, the distance from traditional cultural
forms registered by radical temporal abstraction
does indeed associate it with a particular culture
the culture of capitalto what extent does this
imply that the political content of any particular
modernism is in some way compromised by this affinity, in advance?32 Such, as we shall see, is Tafuris
quintessentially Marxian question.

Production
For Marx, economic, political and social processes are
articulated through dialectical relationships between
three elements or moments: material productive
forces (or the means/mode of production), actual
social relationships (or the division of labour, ownership and law) and spiritual consciousness (ideology:
something between the freedom of total man and
alienated false consciousness). In taking up, and
exploring the potentialities of this thought, we
must reflect upon the objects, images, techniques
and ideas through which architecture produces: its
means of production. Similarly, we must consider

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what it produces. First, operating according to the

demands of development, it produces particular
material objects (buildings, environments, spectacle).
Second, it produces social practices associated with
both the production and consumption or occupation
of these specific material objects and technologies.
Third, it produces and reproduces itself as a discourse, as knowledge. These relationships undergo
constant change. The emergence for example of
computer-aided
manufacturing
technologies
(a means of production) are opening up important
new ways for architects to get involved in making
things (shifts in the division of labour).
Here we need to attend to specific histories
charting the divisions of mental and physical
labour within the production of spatial culture and
the built environment among these, as Vidler
points out, the historical emergence of the
profession of architecture itself as autonomous,
as an ideology in its own right:
[It is this ideology] which, in the first instance was
constructed in order to provide symbols in the
form of monuments, to authorise works of
public and private display, to provide aesthetic
cover for the ramified building activities of
capitalist society. [ . . . ] it has informed the
so-called vandalism of the Revolutionary
period, the building of Haussmanns monuments,
the experiments of Eiffel and Hennebique, the
construction of state capitals from New Delhi to
Chandigarh and Brasilia.33
One could not find a more powerful exemplification
of capitalisms accomplishment of wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and
Gothic cathedrals, its constant revolutionising [of]

the instruments of production, and thereby the

relations of production. Equally, however, as the
likes of Andrew Saint and Graham Ive have insisted,
actual spatial-social relationships must be understood through specific histories and struggles
around, for example, land ownership and property
law in relation to which architectural ideology
comes to be defined. Unfortunately, such work still
remains marginalised.
In Lefebvre, who could offer something to such
studies, space itself is, of course, conceived as
commodity within capitalist modernity, but also as
something far more structural to the workings of
capitalas the spaces both through which capital
flows and which are themselves generated by
capital. Drawing, finally, on Tafuri in particular, and
in the light of Marxs three elements or
moments, it is useful, therefore, to consider
briefly what might be described as the three distinct
tasks placed upon architectural knowledge in capitalist modernity. The first is to act as technicians of
spatial development. Under capitalism, this is primarily the task of commodifying space. This is
what the vast majority of architects spend the vast
majority of their time involved in. The second task
is a poetic or artistic one, and is to do with
somehow dealing with, expressing, intensifying or
ameliorating the spatial experience of modernity.
The third task is an utopian or avant-garde one, and
is to do with imagining alternative socio-spatial
futures. Although all three are always present in
each other to some degree, there have been
moments in the struggle over social space and its
modes of production where the third task, imagining
alternative socio-spatial futures, becomes an urgent

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part of defining the first taskthe work to be done

by everyday technicians of spatial development.

Avant-garde and Utopia

The above is necessarily schematic, but such
moments of struggle and futural imagining would
include, most obviously, the first ten years in Russia
following the revolution, where the relative
positions of architects, the building industry and political structures were rethought at the same time as
proposed and realised projects (from domestic
objects to buildings to entire urban regions) which
were at least partly embedded in these new social
relationships (the division of labour, ownership and
law). Other particular moments would include the
struggles over space in the Social Democratic cities
of Germany, as famously analysed by Tafuri, and
involving the activist tradition around Bruno Taut,
the expressionists and the Artists Soviet, Ernst
May, Martin Wagner, and others. Yet other
moments would include the worldwide struggles
over space that culminated in 1968, and which
define one set of parameters for Lefebvres work.
As well as projects like Constants (presently much
celebrated) New Babylon, one also thinks of the
(sometimes partly parodic or ironic) images of
alternative socio-spatial futures produced by
groups like Superstudio and Archigram: Benjaminian
wish-images that necessarily suggest, whether
through their endless megastructural audacity, or
through the simple abolition of the building commodity, a revision of the ways that social space is
owned, controlled and organised; an utopian
yearning for an alternate non-capitalist future that
might be constructed out of the present.

One of the many important problems raised by

Tafurisomewhat against the grain of Benjamins
argument in this instanceis precisely to do with
the viability of these images of alternative sociospatial futures, which are potentially seen by him
as being dangerous ideological veils, if not rooted
in already-existing changes to social relationships.
That is, such positions can threaten to result only
in self-deception, obscuring real possibilities of
transforming reality and ultimately reinforcing the
relationships they seek to displace. Unable to
reflect upon the social conditions of its own ideological status, and the division of labour sustaining
it, the desire to overcome an institutional separation
from the social life-world, on the part of art or architecture themselves, can only ever result in a false
reconciliation under capitalism. Hence, for Tafuri,
the unavoidably tragic history of the Benjaminian
attempt to dissolve the auratic architectural object;
a dissolution which may have been the only possibility of rendering itself political, but whichin
the face of the production cycle of a metropolis
that it could never controlfound its intrinsic
limits always exposed. Yet we should return the
architectural problems treated here, as Tafuri
himself demands, to the theoretical context of
the most advanced studies of Marxist thought
which originally defined them.
Understanding of Tafuris writings within architectural discourse has been blocked by a failure to
locate them in this way. Tafuri himself refers to the
journal Contropiano, in which the essay Towards a
Critique of Architectural Ideology first appeared in
1969, and this titles own evident allusion to Marxs
Critique of Political Economy.34 Read in this context

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it is clear that Tafuris notorious arguments actually

constitute the architectural elaboration of what can
be construed as a fairly classical Marxian critique of
a reformist, social democratic attempt to work
within existing socio-political institutions. At the
same time, the twentieth-century avant-garde
appears, for Tafuri, as something like a specifically
urban repetition of romanticisms founding
naiveteits utopian linkage of aesthetic absolutism
to the work of politicswhich itself repeats Marxs
own strictures against nineteenth-century utopian
socialism (of the type propounded by Fourier).
Marxs critique of utopianism, like Tafuris, always
rested upon its failure to yoke subjective transformative will to the real movement of social developments.
Yet this is not the whole story. The problem with
Bermans justly renowned reading of the Communist
Manifesto is, for example, to be located in its ultimate reduction of modernity and modernism,
against its own political intentions, to an essentially
celebratory dynamic identified completely with the
productive logic of capitalism itself; and there can
be little doubt that Tafuri risks such a reduction
also. Marx appears then as the great poet of capitalist modernity, expressing and articulating its
defining experience; a conception which enticingly
prefigures his current reception as prophet of globalisation. Not that this is unimportant, but restricted
to a kind of energetics of present upheaval
above all, the intoxicating maelstrom of metropolitan lifeas it is in Berman in particular, it elides
that other temporal dynamic so key to Marxs modernism: its futural impulse towards a non-capitalist
alternative. As such, before rushing to reiterate
the usual obituary notices for the avant-gardes

stratagems, whether broadly artistic or politicalthat failure of transformative intent which,

given its effective irresistibility, has never really
been a failure at all (for what is a failure when, on
its own terms, it could never have achieved
success)it would be more fruitful to reflect upon
what is revealed by such ambitions themselves,
what they may tell us about the character of the
screen on which they are projected.35 This would
be, more modestly, to seek to comprehend something of our contemporary situation through a
reflection upon its historical character, upon both
its ideological resistances and prefigurations. At
stake here would be, at the very least, the possibility
of architectural form and knowledge as an ongoing
medium for the expression of social contradiction;
an expression which, nonetheless, takes place
within, as Osborne says, the horizon of their sublation, of a possible post-capitalist future, even if such
a future can apparently no longer be positively
projected by the work.36
Adorno makes, in his one essay devoted to architecture, what is itself an exemplary Marxist point:
[Architectural work] is conditioned by a social
antagonism over which the greatest architecture
has no power: the same society which developed
human productive energies to unimaginable
proportions has chained them to conditions of
production imposed upon them. [ . . . ] This fundamental contradiction is most clearly visible in
architecture.37
It is this visibilityits formal and phenomenological
registering of the disjunction between the (technological and social) possibilities and actuality of modernitythat gives architecture something of what

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Jameson calls its emblematic significance (as in, for

example, post-conceptual art, as well as in contemporary cultural theory): its immediacy to the social,
the seam it shares with the economic.38 For Tafuri,
we should remember, architecture is always, even at
its most silent, the site of communicative spatial
practices (perhaps especially at its most silent).39
This relates today, most obviously and immediately, to architectures articulation of the internal
and external historically variable relationships that
it has to other cultural forms within the antagonistic
reality of the capitalist metropolis to whose
productive logics it is subjectedmass media,
communication technologies, advertising, commodity design, signage, retail display, and so onso as
critically to mediate and express existing forms of
social conflict and laceration within itself. At the
same time, however, such articulation takes place,
globally, in the context of what is a geographically
and culturally uneven process of capitalist development, as Marxist geographers like David Harvey
remind us. In this light, one of the weaknesses of
both Tafuris and Bermans somewhat over-totalising
accounts of modernism becomes apparent. For
what Tafuri describes as a prefiguration of an
abstract final moment of development coincident
with a global rationalisation is, as a developmental
process, by no means as monolithic or as absolute
(even in its abstraction) as he appears to have
supposed.40
It is this that should, finally, cause us to complicate
the account of modernity with which we started
out. For, as Harvey points out, the description of
modernity in the Communist Manifesto itself is not
free of such problems, in its tendency to presume

that capitalist industry and commodification will

lead to simple homogenisation. In fact, our global
capitalist modernity presents itself only as a differentiated unity, in which such differences are themselves part of what capital accumulation and
market structures produce (not merely residues of
some pre-capitalist social form). In Harveys tentative
words: There is a potentially dangerous estimation
within the Manifesto of the powers of capital . . .
to mobilise geopolitically, within the overall
homogenisation achieved through wage labour
and market exchange.41 This mobilisation and
differentiation, in its dialectic with homogenisation, clearly has considerable implications for the
potentialities of contemporary architectural practice
and knowledge; one which a moralistic and conservative phenomenology, centred around simplistic
conceptions of place, is evidently unable to grasp.
The reverberations of Marxs account of capitalist
modernity are extraordinary, and find their way into
architectural discourse at many varied points. Here,
for example, is Rem Koolhaas describing our
present moment: a moment when the electronics
revolution seems about to melt all that is solidto
eliminate all necessity for concentration and physical
embodiment.42 Whatever one thinks of his (always
provisional) solutions to this elimination, perhaps
no contemporary architect has seemed so engaged
with the questions for architecture raised by what
Marx foresaw as capitalist modernitys key spatial
consequencesthe annihilation of space [or,
rather, place] by time, the horizon of a connectivity
of an everywhere. All programmes thus become
abstract, Koolhaas writes, inasmuch as now
they are no longer tied to a specific place or city,

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but fluctuate and gravitate opportunistically around

the point offering the highest number of connections.43 What does this mean for architectural production? Murray Fraser has suggested that the
tactics for Koolhaas in recent projects are those of
spatial transgression within different cultural contexts, as in the public right of way that is to snake
through the CCTV headquarters in Bejing, or
embedded spatial redundancy, as in the wastage
of retail volume in the Prada store at Rodeo Drive,
Los Angeles.44 Similarly, Hilde Heynen in her
reading of the Zeebrugge Sea Terminal project
understands Koolhaas as producing a unique
locus so that this particular intersection within the
network is different from any other, giving character
to the nondescript, incoherent area that Zeebrugge
is at present.45 Yet such difference must now be
understood as part of that differentiated unity of
global capitalist modernity itself, in which, as we
have said, such differences are themselves part of
what capital accumulation and market structures
produce. These are not residues of some pre-capitalist social form, or reactive enclaves bulwarked
against the encroachment of modernity, but themselves part of a new spatial logic (of connectivity
and abstraction that exceeds the logic of place)
which it is Koolhaass great merit to have faced. It
is not clear that an essentially aesthetic terminology
of character, which precisely still seems linked to a
spatial logic of place, will really be able to grasp this.
The questions raised by all this are huge, and
beyond the scope of this essay, but, as a prolegomenon to their further interrogation, it is in such a
context that we find ourselves returning to Marx.
If capitalism itself is, as we said at the outset,

now more invasive than ever, a sober confrontation

with its contemporary global reality is more urgent
than ever. It is as part of such a confrontation that
architecture might provide a critical knowledge,
with genuine transdisciplinary significance, which
could, at the very least, tell us something of its
social and spatial forms.

Notes and references

1. See, for example, the symposium on Christopher
J. Arthurs crucial book, The New Dialectic and Marxs
Capital, in the journal Historical Materialism, vol. 13,
no. 2 (2005), pp. 27 221.
2. See David Murray and Mark Neocleous, Marx Comes
First Again, and Loses, Radical Philosophy, 134
(November/December, 2005), p. 60.
3. Daniel Bensaid, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and
Misadventures of a Critique, trs., Gregory Elliot
(London & New York, Verso, 2002), p. ix.
4. See Peter Osborne, How To Read Marx (London,
Granta, 2005), pp. 1 3.
5. Bensaid, Marx for Our Times, op. cit., p. xi.
6. The participants in the colloquium were: Iain Borden,
David Cunningham, Gail Day, Murray Fraser, Jon
Goodbun, Peter Osborne, Jane Rendell, Jeremy Till
and Anthony Vidler. Significant contributions were
also made from the floor by Adrian Forty, Michael
Edwards, Nic Clear and David Pinder, among others.
We would like to thank here Richard Difford, Ken
Paterson and Alex Warwick for their assistance and
support in organising the event, as well as all those
who attended.
7. Kate Nesbit, Introduction to Manfredo Tafuri, Problems
in the Form of a Conclusion, in Kate Nesbit, ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of
Architectural Theory, 19651995 (New York, Princeton
Architectural Press, 1996), p. 361.

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8. See David Cunningham, The Concept of the

Metropolis: Philosophy and Urban Form, Radical
Philosophy, 133 (September/October, 2005), p. 13.
9. See, for some specific thoughts on this, Jon Goodbun
and David Cunningham, On Surrealism and Architecture, in Samantha Hardingham, ed., The 1970s is
Here and Now, Architectural Design, vol. 75, no. 2
(March/April, 2005), pp. 66 69.
10. Peter Osbornes contribution to the colloquium, Art as
Displaced Urbanism: Notes on a New Constructivism of
the Exhibition-Form, appears in . . . With All Due
Intent, the catalogue for Manifesta 5, European
Biennial of Contemporary Art, Donostia-San Sebastien,
2004. See also, on this architectural turn, Peter
Osborne, Non-Places and the Spaces of Art, The
Journal of Architecture, vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer, 2001),
pp. 183 194.
11. This was the central issue that defined an issue of The
Journal of Architecture, vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer, 2001),
which we co-edited with Karin Jaschke under the
title Returns of the Avant-Garde: Post-War Movements. For a gratifying response to some of the questions raised by this issue, see Esra Akcan, Manfredo
Tafuris Theory of the Architectural Avant-Garde, The
Journal of Architecture, vol. 7, no. 2 (Summer, 2002),
pp. 135 170.
12. We leave aside the question of whether or not the
conception of alienation that the early Marx inherits
from Hegel is any longer adequate to a theorisation
of what is at stake here.
13. See Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies
of Cities and Regions (Oxford, Blackwell, 2000),
pp. 19 49, 6, 8.
14. For a discussion of Marxs EPM within the context of
nineteenth century German orientalism and spatial
aesthetics, see Jon Goodbun, Marx Matters, in Katie
Lloyd Thomas, ed., Material Matters (London, Routledge, 2006).

15. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of

1844, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed., Robert
C. Tucker (London & New York, W.W. Norton), p.89.
16. Ibid., p. 87.
17. Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trs., Chris
Turner (London, Verso, 1995), p. 25.
18. See Osborne, How to Read Marx, op. cit., pp. 379, 53.
19. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time I: The Fault of
Epimetheus, trs., Richard Beardsworth (Stanford,
Stanford University Press, 1998). See also, on the
relationship of such technics to the city, Bernard
Stiegler, Technics of Decision, Angelaki, vol. 8, no. 2
(August, 2003), pp. 154 5.
20. One should be careful here, nonetheless, for what
Marx means by commodity fetishism, in Capital,
should not be confused with a commodity aesthetics
in the sense explored by someone like Wolfgang
Haugwhat might be better described as consumer
fetishism. See Osborne, How to Read Marx, op. cit.,
pp. 11 14. Rather, commodity fetishism concerns
the social being of the commodity itself, in general,
in its possession of exchange-value. This is essentially
abstract and, in itself, has, as Marx makes very clear,
nothing to do with the particular sensual, material
aspects of specific commodities, although it is no less
real for that.
21. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trs., Harry Zohn, in Illuminations
(London, Fontana, 1973), p. 233.
22. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, trs., Barbara
Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1976), p. ix.
23. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The
Experience of Modernity (London and New York,
Verso, 1983), p. 89.
24. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trs., Samuel Moore (London, Penguin, 2002),
pp. 222 3, 224. See also Marshall Berman, All That
is Solid Melts Into Air, op. cit., p. 21.

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25. Peter Osborne, Non-Places and the Spaces of Art,

op. cit., p. 183. See also Peter Osborne, Philosophy in
Cultural Theory (London and New York, Routledge,
2000), pp. 63 77.
26. See Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A
Critique (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1999), p. 1.
27. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trs., Martin Nicholaus
(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973), pp. 358, 359.
28. Walter Benjamin, Conversations with Brecht, trs.,
Stanley Mitchell, in Understanding Brecht (London,
New Left Books, 1973), p. 111.
29. See David Cunningham, The Phenomenology of
Non-Dwelling, Crossings, 7 (Fall, 2004).
30. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1994).
31. See Michael Hayes, Modernism and the Post-Humanist
subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig
Hilberseimer (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1992).
32. Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, op. cit.,
p. 60.
33. Anthony Vidler, Disenchanted History/Negative
Theories: Tafuris Dream Book, unpublished paper
from the Westminster colloquium, Marx, Architecture
and Modernity, p. 1.
34. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, op. cit., pp. viii ix. See
also Gail Day, Strategies in the Metropolitan Merz,
Radical Philosophy, 133 (September/October, 2005),
pp. 26 38. This latter article draws upon Days paper
delivered at the Westminster colloquium, Marx,
Architecture and Modernity.
35. Rem Koolhaas: The city [is] always the screen on
which the avant-garde projects its ambitions, against

36.
37.

38.

39.
40.
41.

42.
43.
44.

45.

which the avant-garde prepares its (usually futile)

stratagems of substitutions. Eno/abling Architecture
in R. E. Somol, ed., Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America (New York, Monacelli
Press, 1997), p. 294.
Peter Osborne, Remember the Future?, pp. 74, 75.
Theodor W. Adorno, Functionalism Today, in Neil
Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in
Cultural Theory (London & New York, Routledge,
1997), p. 16. For a more detailed reading of this
essay, see David Cunningham, Architecture as
Critical Knowledge, in Mark Dorrian, Murray Fraser,
Jonathan Hill and Jane Rendell, eds, Critical
Architecture (London and New York, Routledge,
2006), forthcoming.
Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings
on the Postmodern, 19831998 (London & New York,
Verso, 1998), p. 163.
See Jon Goodbun, Brand New Tafuri, The Journal of
Architecture, vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer, 2001).
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, op. cit., p. 62.
David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical
Geography (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press,
2001), pp. 383 4.
Rem Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL (Koln, Benedikt Taschen
Verlag, 1997), p. 606.
Ibid., p. 234.
Murray Fraser, The Cultural Context of Critical Architecture, The Journal of Architecture, vol. 10, no. 3
(2005), p. 320 (emphasis added).
Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, op. cit.,
p. 215.